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Comment by lpmitchell | Hacker News Reader

The m.media-amazon.com domain (and a few other CDN'd domains that they use) are running through Fastly:

    nslookup m.media-amazon.com
    
    Name:  media.amazon.map.fastly.net

It is very interesting that they are not using CloudFront!

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really, m.media-amazon.com seems to have a very short TTL (showing 37 seconds right now) and has been weighted to cloudfront now.

Amazon is also known to use Akamai. Sure, Amazon relies heavily on AWS, but why should it surprise anyone that a retail website obsessed with instant loading of pages decides to use non-AWS CDNs if the performance is better.

Even if CloudFront became the default, I'm certain amazon.com would keep contracts with fastly and akamai just so they can weight traffic away from CloudFront in an outage.

Good to have 3rd party redundancy, time to fail over to something else now I'd think though.

They already have:

  $ host m.media-amazon.com
  m.media-amazon.com is an alias for c.media-amazon.com.
  c.media-amazon.com has address 99.86.119.84

(which is a Cloudfront IP)

Yep they did exactly this and are now running on cloudfront

Why?

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